As a filmmaker Steven Spielberg seems to have it all. His films are widely popular, both in the United States and abroad, which almost guarantees their financial success and provides him leverage, both economic and political, within the movie community in Hollywood. The critics, especially the daily reviewers, generally seem to agree with the public and have given Spielberg’s films consistently high marks for the quality of their technical achievement, the inventiveness of their experimentation, and more recently the depth and daring of their subject matter. As one critic put it, his films produce Gone with the Wind grosses and Citizen Kane reviews. Because of all of his success, Steven Spielberg has fashioned an enviable career as a writer, producer, and director of American motion pictures, winning Academy Awards for Best Direction (Saving Private Ryan and Schindler’s List), for Best Film (Schindler’s List), and also receiving from the Academy the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for “creative production.” With David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg he founded Dreamworks SKG, the newest and already one of the most productive and respected studios in Hollywood. For all of these achievements Steven Spielberg has become a cultural force not only in America but around the world.
However, despite all of his success, wealth, and influence Spielberg’s films have not avoided controversy. Of course, a director whose films do not elicit some controversy could not be as influential nor would his films be as appealing. Besides, controversy generates debate and debate is the lifeblood of film criticism, and as the following anthology demonstrates, Spielberg and his films have managed to attract more than their fair share of critical attention, some of it justified, some not.
Most of the serious writing about Spielberg’s work from critics and scholars has appeared scattered in periodicals, many of them specialist publications and professional journals not always easily accessible. The Films of Steven Spielberg collects for the first time many of the more significant of these essays and reviews, that both praise and are sharply critical of the films and the director, and provides a comprehensive overview of the reception of Spielberg’s films by professional critics, some in cinema studies and some from other fields. The purpose in compiling such an anthology was to make available for students and professionals alike a cross section of the critical response to Spielberg’s movies in the hopes that it will stimulate further discussion of the films.
The selections have been arranged by film in the chronological order in which they appeared. Many of the essays and reviews were published during the period of the film’s initial release, but not all, so some retain an immediacy and some are reflective. Because of the limitations of space, reprint availability, the number of films Spielberg has released to date, and the focus of the collection on the debate engendered by them, it was impossible to provide a response to all of Spielberg’s movies. But certain films just evoke more discussion than do others, so I have included two selections each on Jaws, Empire of the Sun, and Schindler’s List. In addition, I have chosen essays which vary in complexity, including some that are rather heavily theoretical as well as some that are more general. My reason for doing so was to appeal to a broad range of readers.
The collection opens with two essays on Spielberg’s first important film, Jaws. In spite of the fact that it was adapted from a hugely popular best-selling novel, opened as what is now considered a “summer” movie, and became one of the highest grossing films of all time, Jaws has attracted considerable serious critical attention. Citing such traditional American texts as J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick, Henry David Thoreau’s Cape Cod, and James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers, Jonathan Lemkin in his “Archetypal Landscapes and Jaws” places the film historically in the context of an archetypal American landscape, contrasting the position of the land with the sea in the film and in American literature. Drawing on the cultural concepts of Sigmund Freud and C. G. Jung, Lemkin also extends the symbolic reach of Jaws, informing the film with a mythic and psychoanalytical dimension.
Thomas S. Frenz and Janice Hocker Rushing in their “Integrating Ideology and Archetype in Rhetorical Criticism, Part II: A Case Study of Jaws” expands Lemkin’s analysis of Jungian archetypes in the film with an integration of ideological criticism drawn from the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson and the feminist critic Jane Caputi. Although Frenz and Rushing state that such an approach seems incommensurate with rhetorical criticism, they combine Jung’s depth psychology, Jameson’s Marxism, and Caputi’s feminism to account for “both historical and universal symbols within rhetorical texts.” Because Jaws left such an indelible mark on the American psyche, it proves a test case for their integrative analysis in which they demonstrate how the film “admits of both ideological and archetypal interpretations.”
In “Language and the Music of the Spheres: Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind” Charlene Engle examines the film in the context of “communications and its limitations, language and its possibilities,” things “beyond speech or imagining,” and the “spiritual and the supernatural.” She argues, “the film is about breaking down barriers—national, linguistic, physical, and bureaucratic—in the pursuit of knowledge.” When the barriers have been removed, humans are prepared for the world-changing event motivated by the close encounter of the third kind. Engle also explicates the biblical and religious elements in the film, and relates it to a series of other movies—interestingly enough outside the science fiction genre to which Close Encounters clearly belongs—so that her reading places it in a broader context. Finally she makes her claim that Close Encounters of the Third Kind must be seen as a sophisticated example of how movies can artfully combine visual, verbal, electronic, and musical languages into an engaging, and quite sophisticated, meditation on the skill of the motion picture to invest in a simple smile “the most complete, and the most satisfying form of communication in the universe.”
The Indiana Jones series (to date three films) have proven to be among the most enduringly popular of Spielberg’s movies. The nonstop action, the nostalgic period decor, and the winning persona of the hero played with superb élan by Harrison Ford have contributed to this popularity. In an attempt to account for its reception Lane Roth examines the film’s action-adventure elements as a “quest,” a theme explored in the work of Northrop Frye, C. G. Jung, Mircea Eliade, and Joseph Campbell, critics in various ways all involved in exploring cultural myths and symbols. In “Raiders of the Lost Archetype: The Quest and the Shadow” Roth links the “quest” with the “shadow,” an archetype detected by Jung which represents “the darker side of our nature,” to help clarify the film’s ability “to communicate rapidly to a large, heterogeneous audience” through the spontaneous reactions archetypes unconsciously elicit.
Ilsa J. Bick, a child and adult psychiatrist, was among the first to explain the appeal of Spielberg’s films through an analysis of his preoccupation with children and childhood, a theme developed later by many others. In “The Look Back in E.T.” she explores the cultural conditions and psychological depths of E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial in order to account for its phenomenal success by emphasizing “the film’s ability to touch upon many developmental levels, potent intrapsychic conflicts, and pervasive sociocultural considerations.” Further, Bick examines the film in the context of what Pauline Kael called “the politics of bliss” which characterized the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, a period of happiness “bought with ignorance, magical wish-fulfillment, and historical mutability.” In 1992, the time of the essay’s publication, Bick claimed that the American public had grown intolerant of “the bliss and the sunny” of the Reagan years and as a consequence noted Spielberg’s “failure,” his loss of influence and power in Hollywood and American popular culture and the fading appeal of his “exhaustively repetitive narratives.” Her analysis still resonates today despite the director’s recovery of his influence in both Hollywood and in American popular culture through his amazing adaptability to popular taste and his growing sophistication as a director and producer.
The Color Purple, adapted from Alice Walker’s novel, was the first of Spielberg’s overtly “serious” films, and because of the way it depicted the lives of African-Americans, it also became one of his most controversial. Gerald Early’s “The Color Purple as Everybody’s Protest Art” compares the film to the novel, an understandable but always problematic undertaking, and argues that although the novel was not very good, it should have been made into a excellent film since a book like The Color Purple so easily lends itself to the “glossy and excessively sentimental treatment” that Hollywood so often provides for “serious subjects” or pop-culture attempts as social protest. In spite of its awards, nominations, and strong box office, the film, in Early’s estimation, finally is just another in a long line of inept Hollywood films about race.
Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, another adaptation, this time from J. G. Ballard’s novel, fared better with the critics and was praised for its handling of the grim side of World War II, a subject Spielberg would revisit some ten years later in Saving Private Ryan. Andrew Gordon in his essay “Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun: A Boy’s Dream of War” describes the film as a combination of a boy’s adventure story and a prisoner-of-war movie, and one which allowed the director to grow as a filmmaker—helped by Tom Stoppard’s screenplay and perhaps inspired by David Lean’s epics. In Gordon’s estimation the film still has flaws: It is overlong and too slow in places; its spectacle occasionally overwhelms the narrative and threatens to glamorize war; and John Williams’ music is obtrusive. But Gordon prefers the film to the novel and characterizes it as a “visually stunning war epic filled with rich imagery, and something new for his career: a psychologically profound character study,” a death-laden film about loss and yearning.
Frank Gormlie also analyzes Empire of the Sun as an adaptation but laments the loss of complexity in the character of Jim, the film and novel’s central character, and of Ballard’s philosophical fatalism, purchased at the expense of the film’s narrative tautness and tension. Lost, too, is the individuality and complexity of the Japanese characters with a resultant over validation of the Americans. Although he discusses the film’s cultural referents, Gormlie finds that the film focuses too narrowly on Jim, has an unmotivated happy ending, and with its closure suggests that the problems raised by the narrative can be all too successfully resolved. But, finally, however limiting he may see the film, Gormlie recognizes the film’s need for an economy of narrative and to provide the conventional cinematic elements an audience demands.
In the end, all Spielberg’s films are more or less homages to the traditional Hollywood film, its genres, themes, and styles. Whether making a serial adventure like the Indiana Jones movies, a crazy comedy like 1941, or variations on science fiction movies, especially of the 1950s, Spielberg acknowledges his debts to the cinematic traditions of the classic American film, but Always goes one step further: It is an actual remake, of sorts, of A Guy Named Joe (1942), a conventional World War II romance. H. R. Greenberg in “Raiders of the Lost Text” writes about how Spielberg adapts this film and its traditions for a contemporary audience, but complains that he has done so rather badly. Greenberg admits that the original film is slight and sentimental—he calls it a “chestnut”—but faults Spielberg for draining the film of its “ideological freight,” infantilizing its protagonists, denying its history, and creating a film as empty as many other recent remakes and sequels. Also, for Greenberg, Always reveals Spielberg’s blindspots: “his predilection for wretched excess, visually and aurally; his simpleminded admiration for the male-based professionalism celebrated in the movies of Howard Hawks and John Ford; and, above all, an unreflective hankering... after what the director evidently valorizes as an ideologically simpler era he never lived through... but chiefly experienced via its pop culture artifacts.”
Patricia Pace begins her essay on Hook by remarking that critics and media watchers had by 1984 dubbed Steven Spielberg as “the perennial Peter Pan,” a director who was “cinema’s ur-child who will not grow up, gifted with a child’s eye and childlike wonder, or, alternately, the worldly movie mogul driven to reproduce, compulsively, in film after film, an unresolved Oedipal conflict.” Drawing on the work of Freud, Lacan, and others, “Robert Bly Does Peter Pan: The Inner Child as Father to the Man in Steven Spielberg’s Hook” examines the film as an “imitation of Peter Pan as a contemporary fantasy which pretends to celebrate childhood, but instead, uses the image of the child to recuperate a longed-for, if mythic, masculine authority.” Pace concludes that Spielberg encourages his audiences to remain blissfully childlike, “looking back to a Neverland that never was, safe in the stronghold of the patriarchal family.”
Stephen Jay Gould, an admitted dinophile since childhood, examines Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park and our fascination with dinosaurs from a variety of perspectives, both scientific and cultural. As science he finds the film wanting but as cultural symbol he acknowledges the film’s power. Unfortunately, Gould fears that manufactured dinosaurs, recreated with such technical skill in the movie and also as museum exhibits, run the risk of distorting and even supplanting a more accurate, if less immediately engaging, study of the real objects of nature. Gould’s essay/review raises some provocative questions about the power of the simulacrum and provides an engaging approach to the film from the point of view of a paleontologist who is also conversant with contemporary popular culture. “Dinomania” is an oddity among film criticism because so rarely do films get read from a scientific perspective, and it is all the more welcome because it does so.
Schindler’s List firmly established Steven Spielberg as a director capable of making a truly serious movie, putting to rest the notion that he is simply a skilled confectioner of well-made but essentially trivial films. The film also attracted a barrage of commentary, some praiseworthy and some virulently negative. The two essays in this collection both commend and criticize the film, applauding the film for its achievements and faulting it for its shortcomings. Kirby Farrell in “The Economies of Schindler’s List” raises the central concern of the critics: that it is somehow unseemly for the film to have garnered so much acclaim, gathered so many awards (it won seven Academy Awards), and made so much money exploiting the Holocaust, an event of almost incomprehensible horror. Most critics have stopped short of suggesting that the event, in many ways singular in modern times, can not be the subject for filming, but, as does Farrell, many fault it for not facing the central moral issues the Holocaust raises by concentrating excessively on the character of Oscar Schindler and his rescue of a couple hundred victims of Nazi barbarism. Farrell’s response to this criticism is to try to look for “signs that may well tell us about the Holocaust and also about the culture screening the film.”
Ora Gelley takes a more positive view of Shindler’s List. He sees its pretensions (whether justified or not) as trying to represent the “horrors of the Holocaust in its totality”—“the liquidation of the ghetto, the gas chambers, the transport trains, the selection, the burning of the corpses.” He argues that in the film Spielberg “reveals a clear awareness of the immensity of the horrors it is referring to, yet the problematic nature of its engagement with these emblematic sites of trauma discloses the ambiguity of the film’s intention.” But in the end “Narration and the Embodiment of Power in Schindler’s List” also questions to what extent the narrative of the Jews can be told successfully within and through a narrative focused on the single individual of Oscar Schindler.
We are still too close to the release of Amistad (1997) and Saving Private Ryan (1998) as yet to have a clear understanding of how these films will be received over time. But the essays which conclude this collection provide some parameters for future analysis. Gary Rosen states up front in his history-based essay “‘Amistad’ and the Abuse of History” that he finds this film sharing with its predecessor, Schindler’s List, the same improbable qualities. Aside from the “savage injustice” of its happy ending, Rosen believes Spielberg is also guilty of once again altering history for the demands of a big-screen Hollywood spectacle, a fact widely overlooked by the popular reviews of the film on its release and an omission compounded by the Dreamworks publicity department’s release of the Amistad learning kits to colleges and high schools across the country. Furthermore, Rosen argues that the movie confirms and extends racial stereotypes which will make it harder to tell the truth about racism in our history and to ourselves.
Louis Menand’s review of Saving Private Ryan, “Jerry Don’t Surf,” challenges Spielberg to abandon or at least modify his approach to the conventional Hollywood film with its emphasis on only getting the audience to feel, to connect emotionally with the screen, and to make films that work to get the audience also to think, to confront “what they did not already think, or what they thought without really understanding.” In trying to direct films located somewhere between entertainment and art Spielberg has diluted his respect for both his material and his audience and finally done justice to neither.
Despite all of the quarrels, controversy, and arguing among the critics and reviewers of Steven Spielberg’s films, this collection attests to their influence which have earned him a significant place in the history of cinema and in the culture of our time. Spielberg has demonstrated over and over again that through his skills and talent he can make films on varied subjects, many of them which ambitiously challenge our conventional social and cultural beliefs. The extent to which he has been successful in his ambitions remains uncertain. However, what does appear certain is that he will continue to make movies which engage, and maybe at times enrage, us and that these movies will continue to draw huge audiences worldwide and that Steven Spielberg will remain among the most inventive and consequential of contemporary filmmakers.